[1]. Kumar, Srijan, et al. “An army of me: Sockpuppets in online discussion communities.” Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2017.
Summary:
In this paper, Kumar et al. present a study on sockpuppets in online discussion communities. They perform their study on nine different online discussion communities and their data consisted of around 2.9 million users. Authors use multiple logins from the same IP to identify sockpuppets and evaluate the posting behavior and linguistic features of sockpuppets to build a classifier. The authors find that the ordinary users and sockpuppets use different languages and sockpuppets tend to write more posts than ordinary users (699 vs. 19). Sockpuppets also use more first person and second person singular personal pronouns and are more likely to be down-voted, reported, or deleted. The authors also explain the types of sockpuppets as “pretenders and non-pretenders” and “supporters vs. dissenters”.
Reflection:
I really enjoyed reading this paper because the study they performed was very different especially the labels creation using IP addresses and user sessions. The authors received non-anonymized data from Disqus, which makes me question that is it legal for Disqus to share non-anonymized data?
Some of the findings in the study were very astonishing such as email addresses and usernames of sockpuppets are more similar. First, I do not like the approach to classify sockpuppets based on username and second, I am having hard time believing that sockpuppets have similar usernames and emails. Do they mean that all usernames and emails of one puppet master similar to one another? Or are they similar to other sockpuppets?
Their findings also show that 30% of sockpuppets are non-supporters, 60% are supporters and only 10% are dissenters. It would have been interesting find that sockpuppets support each other on what kind of topics? Do we see more supporters on political topics? Or are there sockpuppets belonging to one puppet master which are supporters on one left leaning topics and dissenters on right leaning topics and vice versa? If yes, can we claim that does some specific party pay someone to create these sockpuppets?
